Anza has cut the mainnet rollout of its next validator release from three steps to two. The Agave v4.5 release schedule, last edited on 10 November 2026, also pauses release work for Breakpoint through 18 November. It targets general adoption on Solana SOL$83.16-4.1% mainnet for 7 December.
Anza develops Agave, a Solana validator client. It summarised the change on X on 10 November: mainnet adoption "drops to two steps: 20% stake โ general adoption, cutting a week from our release cycle." The cycle also plans three changes developers and users will notice. New accounts need smaller deposits, programs work on account data without copying it, and program upgrades get simpler.
Agave v4.5 mainnet adoption: a 20% volunteer step, then everyone
Under the new ladder, Anza asks volunteer validators holding 20% of stake to run v4.5 from 30 November. A week later, on 7 December, it recommends v4.5 to all validators. That first step is a large slice of the network. Solana had 432.4 million SOL of activated stake across 658 validators in epoch 1083, per Solana Compass's validator data. On our arithmetic, 20% is roughly 86 million SOL.
The previous cycle used three steps. The v4.4 schedule asked for 10% of stake, then 20-25%, then general adoption, which Anza called on 30 October. Since then validators have also had to install an unscheduled patch: Anza urged an Agave 4.4.1 upgrade on 5 November ahead of a deadline at epoch 1079.
| Agave v4.5 milestone | Date (2026) |
|---|---|
| v4.5 branch created | 5 November (done) |
| Testnet adoption recommended | 6 November (done) |
| Devnet upgraded | 10 November (done) |
| Release activities paused for Breakpoint | 11 to 18 November |
| Feature activations resume on testnet, devnet and mainnet | 19 November (target) |
| Mainnet upgrade candidate tagged | 27 November (target) |
| Volunteers asked to move 20% of stake | 30 November (target) |
| General adoption recommended; v5.0 branch created | 7 December (target) |
| v4.5 feature activation begins on mainnet | 14 December (target) |
Source: Agave v4.5 Release Schedule, Anza GitHub wiki. Anza calls every date tentative and tells operators to "wait for announcements on Discord before performing any upgrades or downgrades."
The pause lines up with Breakpoint 2026, the Solana Foundation's annual conference, held in London from 15 to 17 November 2026.
Rent reduction steps 3 to 5 under SIMD-0437
Anza lists the next rent cuts among the feature gates "planned for activation this cycle". Rent is the refundable deposit every Solana account must hold, priced per byte of data. Steps 3 to 5 of SIMD-0437 take that price from 5,080 lamports per byte to 2,575, then 1,322, then 696, the last stage of the 90% cut in five steps that began on testnet in August.
For a standard 165-byte token account, the network adds 128 bytes of overhead, so on our arithmetic the deposit falls from about 0.0015 SOL to about 0.0002 SOL once all three steps land. Anza says existing accounts keep working and can withdraw the excess after each step. Separately, empty token accounts still hold a deposit their owners can get back by closing them.
Account data direct mapping (SIMD-0460) for Solana programs
Today the runtime copies an account's data into a program's memory and back out again when the program finishes, and repeats that copy each time one program calls another. With direct mapping, Anza says, "the runtime stops copying account data into the VM and back, including on CPI. Programs read and write it in place."
Developers have homework before it reaches mainnet. Jonas Hahn of the Solana Foundation's developer relations team asked builders on 10 November to "test all [your] programs with the feature virtual_address_space_adjustments enabled. Either locally or against devnet. Some programs still have some divergence."
Auto program resizing (SIMD-0433) for loader-v3 upgrades
The third gate changes how program upgrades handle storage. Per Anza's thread, an upgrade through the upgradeable program loader (loader-v3) will resize the account holding the program's code to fit the new binary. A larger program no longer needs a separate ExtendProgram call first, and a smaller one sends its surplus rent back to the account the developer names to receive it.
Agave v4.5 dates for validators and developers to watch
Anza has not given a mainnet activation date for any individual feature gate. The v4.5 schedule targets 14 December 2026 for the start of v4.5 feature activation on mainnet, so the milestones to watch before then are the 19 November restart of activations after Breakpoint and the 30 November call for volunteers to move 20% of stake.
